We’re Going to Need Some More Professors (Or Not)

You’ll be shocked to hear it, but Nicholas Kristof is missing the point (which your Baffler correspondents have been obliged to point out before).

“When I was a kid,” Kristof said in a February 15 blog post, “the Kennedy administration had its ‘brain trust’ of Harvard faculty members, and university professors were often vital public intellectuals who served off and on in government.”

Jesus, yes: so we’d heard.

Earnestly wishing that professors would pack up their bags of expertise and return to government in last Sunday’s op-ed, Kristof takes special care to describe the career path of McGeorge Bundy, a shining example of the old kind of intellectual who used to pass easily between academia and public service. And, indeed, with wisdom like this, we wouldn’t be so far off course as a country. You know, with all the wars and stuff.

After decades of journalism and scholarship that have endlessly described the disaster of Ivy League hubris in the Cold War and its late colonial manifestations, a newspaper columnist wanders up to the keyboard and writes, completely blind to irony, that it’s a shame we don’t have the kind of academia-to-government pipeline we used to have back in, oh, 1963 or so. How do you write wistfully about the Kennedy administration and its Harvard brain trust without noticing what you’ve written, without noticing that you’ve just described the very group of people whose actions while in power turned the term “the best and the brightest” into a pejorative?

Better yet, Kristof has built a moat in his mind that doesn’t exist on the planet the rest of us use as a home. While Captain Obtuse is talking about “Bridging the Moat Around Universities,” an administration built to a substantial degree from the professoriat shambles listlessly through its second term. A certain former University of Chicago law school lecturer showed up for work in the District of Columbia with half the lunch crowd from the nation’s faculty clubs. Barack Obama’s first secretary of energy was a physics professor; the author of the administration’s legal justification for its undeclared war in Libya was a professor at Yale Law, slumming it for a while at the State Department; Cass Sunstein and Samantha Power carpooled in from Harvard; Christina Romer left U.C. Berkeley, then went back. If only we could bridge the moat around universities and get some professors to come work in government, though, right? I sure hope Professor Yoo is available.

Trimming the examples to fit the argument, Kristof quotes Anne-Marie Slaughter on the unfortunate separation of the university and government service. Slaughter, Kristof writes in the op-ed, is “a former dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton and now the president of the New America Foundation.” Not mentioned: the Princeton emerita is also a former director of policy planning at the State Department. A columnist quotes a person in support of his argument that professors don’t go to work in government anymore . . . and he doesn’t mention that she’s a professor who went to work in government.

The sad truth about power is that its sidewalks are littered with PhDs. Newt Gingrich has one; William Kristol has one; David Petraeus has one; Condoleezza Rice has one; Robert Gates has one; the Kagan cluster has four; Dick Cheney is a UW-Madison ABD, and how awesome it would have been to be a fly on that particular set of walls. Professors Gingrich and Rice even bridged the moat around universities to go serve in government. “Professors, we need you!” Nicholas Kristof cries, and look who comes running.

For the truly strange crime of believing that professors are reliably wise people in a broad and general sense, I sentence Nicholas Kristof to one full year of faculty meetings. May God have mercy on his soul.